OIC conference on Afghanistan

The 57-member Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) met in Islamabad on December 19, 2021 to discuss the Afghanistan humanitarian and economic crisis. The OIC decided to set up a Humanitarian Trust Fund and Food Security Programme to deal with the rapidly aggravating crisis. It also pledged to play a leading role in delivering humanitarian and development aid to the people of Afghanistan. This wording reflects the efforts of our Prime Minister (PM) Imran Khan in his address to the conference to delink the 40 million Afghan people from the Taliban government. The former are in dire straits, the latter unrecognised, shunned, under sanctions, and with Afghanistan’s $ 9 billion reserves frozen by the US. Imran Khan has put forward this argument in the light of the world’s reservations about the Taliban government and its willingness, despite verbal assurances, to uphold human and women’s rights and forge an inclusive government. What to speak of ‘inclusive’, the present Taliban-only government (arguably true to its nature) has been charged recently with committing summary executions of former members of the Afghan security services all over the country.

Reportedly, there were expectations ahead of the OIC conference that it would evoke pledges, commitments and money for aiding the almost 23 million Afghan people facing food shortages (i.e. hunger), including 3.2 million most vulnerable children. However, those harbouring such hopes did not perhaps take into account the track record of the OIC in seldom being able to agree on anything (a Muslim house divided, therefore) or do anything worth mentioning in its 47-year existence. Sure enough, the only pledges forthcoming were $ 265 million from Saudi Arabia and $ 30 million from Pakistan. The rest was silence, ostensibly because, according to our redoubtable Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi, countries that wanted to make aid pledges were hesitant to do so since there was no channel through which aid could be delivered (implying, again, the Taliban government could not play this role). The channel created, the Humanitarian Trust fund and the Food Security Programme, would be hard put to it to implement their decision to set up the structures and means for aid delivery by March 2022. Even if that deadline is met, it may prove too late for the over half the population freezing and dying of hunger and malnutrition in what is proving to be an unusually harsh winter. Troubles, they say, never come except in batches. We must wait and see whether after these channels become functional, what the level of aid committed and delivered will be. To repeat oneself, the OIC has never done anything like this or even remotely mention-worthy so far in its existence.

Pakistan’s leadership, from COAS General Qamar Javed Bajwa to PM Imran Khan and down the food chain, is warning the world of the implications of not aiding the Afghan people, including, according to our PM, the world’s worst man-made disaster. One is tempted to ask the PM who are the authors of this impending disaster? Whereas the US cannot avoid or deny its responsibility in the debacle of its 20-year war and occupation of Afghanistan, which ended precisely in the ignominy informed analysts had been predicting from the start, Pakistan’s role cannot be ignored either. Pakistan’s meddling and interventions through armed religious zealots since 1973 in Afghanistan’s internal affairs have produced the outcome of a medieval Taliban regime, isolated internationally and unable to govern meaningfully. In the process, whatever triumphalism and backslapping self-congratulation may be going on as a result of achieving this Pyrrhic victory, the Taliban’s isolation is wearing off on Pakistan too. In fact, as the proceedings of this OIC conference and Pakistan’s diplomatic efforts show, Pakistan’s establishment’s two dearest causes, Kashmir and a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, hardly raise a sympathetic murmur now in international diplomacy.

One headline in our press declares that the Islamic countries at this OIC conference are ‘one’ on helping Afghanistan. Even if one foregoes one’s scepticism regarding this claim, it may be sufficient to point out that currently, this ‘one’ Islamic world is virtually silent except for lip service on Kashmir, and is witnessing an obscene stampede by one Arab country after another to recognize Israel and betray the Palestinian cause. What price ‘oneness’?!

The truth lies in the almost daily dose of news about women and minority nationalities in Afghanistan raising voice and protesting at their treatment and denial of rights. Witness the queues of hundreds of Afghans seeking passports to leave the country as soon as the Taliban government revived the service. Some seek urgent medical treatment abroad, most seek to escape from the dreadful antediluvian order imposed on them by a backward religious extremist Taliban whose best (or worst) has yet to come.

Islamic State (IS) may be posing the most immediate and potent threat to the Taliban regime as witnessed in their continuing terrorist bombing campaign, but one should not prematurely write off the anti-Taliban resistance that has perforce had to retreat to safe havens in Tajikistan. As Taliban rule unfolds in all its ugly manifestations, more and more ethnic minority nationalities, religious minorities (particularly Shias), women and others are poised to join, or be pushed, into the arms of the resistance.

It ain’t over yet.

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Copyright Business Recorder, 2021